Microsoft is pleased to announce the release of the User Guide, Samples and Walkthroughs for the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, v1.1. The Visual Studio 2005 extensions for SharePoint were released back in Feb 2008 and an update for Visual Studio 2008 is planned for release in June 2008.

The user guide is downloadable here and represents approx 200 pages of documentation applicable to both the 2005 and the 2008 release of the Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint. The user guide contains an introduction to using the Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint, and it contains walkthrough samples for each of the project templates that are supplied with the Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint. These are the document sections:

1. Starting out in SharePoint Development
   An introductory guide.
2. Walkthrough of the VSeWSS User Interface including the WSP View
   A description of the user interface elements. The WSP view is a new tool panel which helps you put together the deployment package for SharePoint projects.
3. The Team Site Project
   A walkthrough and complete sample.
4. The Blank Site Project
   A walkthrough and complete sample.
5. The List Definition Project
   A walkthrough and complete sample.
6. The Web Part Project
   A walkthrough and complete sample.
7. The Workflow Projects
   A walkthrough and complete sample for each of Sequential and State machine workflows. Although these project templates are not shipped with VSeWSS we added them for completeness. They are included in Visual Studio 2008 and are available for Visual Studio 2005 in the Windows SharePoint Services SDK.
8. Project Item Templates
   A description and usage for each of the project item templates. Essentially the project templates are largely empty templates with default project items contained.
9. Best Practices with VSeWSS
   A collection of suggestions for working with the tool.

10. Changes from 1.0 to 1.1
    A list of what was improved. There were lots of improvements from V1.0 of VSeWSS

Here's what the default install directory looks like on my machine. I'm running Windows Server 2008.

Once you unzip the Samples you can see these sub directories. Each sample is a completed example which the User Guide contains a walkthrough (similar to a Hands-on Lab) for. Each sample is in both C# and VB.NET.

To use this user guide you will need the following on your machine or on a Virtual PC image.

1. Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008
2. .NET Framework 3.0 – no charge download
3. Visual Studio 2005 Professional or greater – trial available
4. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP1 – no charge download
5. Windows SharePoint Services SDK 1.3 – no charge download
6. Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET 3.0, Windows Workflow Foundation – no charge download
7. Visual Studio 2005 extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, v1.1 – no charge download

This post swiped from http://blogs.msdn.com/pandrew/